


a thief's smile (sweet as spice)

by SearchingforSerendipity



Series: pjo crossovers: the ichor and gold series [1]
Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Pepper Potts, Backstory, Crossover, F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 03:03:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8693911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: Pepper was nothing like what people envisioned when they thought about children of Hermes.





	

 

 

  
**i** Growing up, no one ever really knew what to do with Virginia.

She was too smart, too pragmatic, too independent. She liked kangaroos and the color purple and maps. Adults didn't understand her and the other children didn't like her. The first time someone picked on her, Virginia's revenge was so terrible no in that class looked at sparkly glue that same way again. Her pens and pencils were always laid out in neat lines over her desk, and she let anyone borrow them as long as they made sure to bring them back. She was great at numbers and languages and geography, liked arts but had no talent. She never slacked off and she was always punctual. Interested, even. But there was something about the way she looked at teachers that didn't sit right with them.

Virginia Potts looked at the world like she was humoring it because she found it endearing and curious, but wanted it to know that, if push came to shove, she could do very well without it.

Her school's track coach was the only one who had any time for her, and this was because the track coach was her mother. Marlene Potts, once an olympian track runner, never let her daughter think that she owed anyone anything except her best from herself. She was distracted and rueful and not nearly as serious as her daughter, but they were a happy family together, and when Marlene fell in love with Miss Bhatia from the history department, Virginia was fiercely happy for her mother's sake.

Her siblings were never her best friends. Few of them were friends at all. They weren't her charges or her playmates but they were family, of a sort. She invited them around to her house. Sometimes they said yes. Connor and Travis had their own change of clothes in her wardrobe. Phil and her could speak on the phone for hours, and when together at camp had the bad habit of gorging themselves on strawberries from the fields, to the point that she became allergic. Some of them said no and showed up anyway. Luke never did, and at the time it did not seem that strange, him being younger than her but so much older around the eyes, rough-handed and bitter-hearted, but years after she regreted not pressing him to share buttery biscuit around her kitchen table. It wouldn't have made a diffrence, but she would have liked to know him better.

She went to Camp Half-Blood every summer, except that time when she was seventeen and won a summer scholarship at an arts college in France. It fueled her old love for traveling, so she took a gap year after graduation and backtracked through Europe. At that time she hadn't really known what to do with her life. She walks old peregrination trails for the history of it and kills three empousai near Prague.

A pharmacist with salt and pepper hair and her upturned nose sells her bandages and a bottle of Gatorade that turns out to be nectar. Hermes says nothing about it and neither does she: they speak of the places she's been to and he gives her advice about the roads and the best places to go. He gives her the adress of secret art galleries and tells her to say the mailman sent her. Virginia smiles, takes her supplies and doesn't let him keep the charge.

"Good travels, miss---" He trails off, terrible fake accent tapering of in a charmingly wry smile. She could see how her mother had come to love that expression, this man's face and her daughter's reluctant grins.

She took a sip of the nectar, spicy and burning on her mouth. "Pepper. Call me Pepper."

 

 

 **ii** "So, I'm a secret agent now," Phil said.

Pepper was sitting in a bench outside her university. It was early summer and her hands ached with carpal tunnel, but all her projects and exams were done. She had celebrated by buying herself a can of Ben&Jerries and calling her favorite brother.

"You can't see me, but I'm lifting my ice-cream in a toast," she told him warmly. "Congratulations, Phil. I know you've wanted to work for the Man since you realized Steve Rogers did."

"Steve Rogers did not work for the Man, he _was_ the Man," he argued, but his tone was light. He was elated, she could tell. She was happy for him as well.

"I guess you'll be keeping a lot of your work life private now." She'd be more bothered if she didn't know how long he'd wanted to have a legitimate reason to say it was confidential need to know only. Some demigods picked up the taste for secrecy. Pepper never had, but she could see the appeal.

"Yes, but don't worry. I'll still come to your graduation," he assured. Pepper hummed and took a bite of her cookie dough ice-cream. "Do you know what you'll be doing after?"

"I've had some offers." Including one from that gallery in Oslo her father had recommended. She had graduated with a minor in art theory; art theft was a viable and appealing option. She was good at accounting, better yet at fraud.

She didn't mention it to Phil. He was a secret agent now. As far as she knew Hermes had never spoken to him, but then again perhaps he had. It wasn't something they spoke of often. "A.I.M. has potential."

"Watch out for Killian Aldritch," he warned, which of course only made her more curious.

In the end, A.I.M. didn't work out very well. But it was quite alright. Stark Industries hadn't withdrawn their offer, and the health insurance was much better. That was nothing to scoff at, for a demigod.

 

 

 **iii** Tony Stark was brilliant and bright and a hot mess. Pepper spent her first exhausting and honestly scarring days as his assistant longing for her golden times last week crunching numbers for S.I., back before she found ourt a mistake in the numbers, and eyeing him for signs of demigodly heritage. He didn't have the Sight, as he apparently didn't spot the literal monsters among the sea of methaphorical monstrous reporters that houded his steps. His reflexes were decent, but human.

Pepper only put a drop of nectar in his cofee that one time, but she endd up regreting that mistake. Tony, whirling around the workshop in the throes of divine inspiration, didn't notice her aghast expression. He didn't heat up and turn into dust, so that was a plus. 

He flirted with her and then ignored her and when neither worked he started treating her as Pepper. She carved herself a place in his life, and if at first it was a job it didn't stay that way forever. Pepper didn't know what to do with that, so she did nothing.

Doing nothing was no longer an option for very long, when a rise in monstrous activity and plots against Olympus shock up the tenuous peace demigods survived in. Poseidon's child followed the footsteps of the great heroes. Pepper, who had never put too much stock in heroic tales of manly warrioirs and knew the reality of divinity, prayed for Percy Jackson, that he might be a better hero than the others before him. The hero demigods deserved, not the one the Gods wanted.

Phil called her when the time came. Pepper cashed in all her free days and told Tony it was a family emergency. The ridiculous part was that it wasn't even a lie. 

He gave her access to his jet. It almost made her feel bad for the crate of prototype army guns she had stolen, but the celestial steel bullets Hephaestus Cabin had commissioned at her request had been designed with Stark guns- rifles, machine guns, some handy handguns - in mind, and grenades worked just as well with monsters as humans. It was the one and only time she stole from Tony Stark, the only time she ever stole a weapon, and it would weight her down, heavy and sour when other thefts came to light.

In the end, it was her own brother that saved the world after nearly dooming it. Pepper stayed at camp long enough for the burning of the shrouds, long enough to help give shape to the future Percy Jackson had demanded for demigods.

"Thank you for being Luke's friend," she told him when they met. His face was haggard and bruised. There was a long strang of white hair in his otherwise dark head, and he looked at her with heartbreaking eyes.

"It wasn't enough," he said, and looked surprised when she put a kind hand in his shoulder.

"It would never have been," or at least that was what she had been telling herself for years now. "Thank you anyway."

His eyes were so old she had to go and hide behind a tree and cry, cry.

 

 

 **iv** "How was the family?" Tony asked, soft around the eyes he hid behind those expensive shade of his. Pepper's eyes were dry, but her side was still wrapped under her pressed suit.

"Oh, you know family. I'm glad to be back." She smiled at him then, her honest thief's grin. He returned it, startled and slow, and Pepper thought, fiercely, _this time i will act and it will be enough_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com)


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